west of the North Sea. This time it was Øystein Haraldsson, a son of Harald Gille. Øystein claimed part of his father's inheritance and was given the title of king, with a third of the kingdom. The three brothers ruled together, apparently in peace, until 1155. According to the sagas, Øystein and Sigurd Munn laid plans to depose their brother Inge and divide his share of the kingdom between them. At the urging of his mother Ingrid Ragnvaldsdotter and the influential lendmann Gregorius Dagsson, Inge decided to strike first, at a meeting among the three kings in Bergen. Sigurd Munn was attacked and killed by Inge's men before Øystein had had time to arrive in the city. Inge and Øystein then reached a tenuous settlement, but conditions between them soon deteriorated into open warfare, ending with Øystein's capture and murder in Bohuslän in 1157. Whether or not Inge himself ordered the killing of his brother seems to have been disputed at the time. The followers of Inge's dead brothers, Øystein and Sigurd Munn, were not inclined to submit to Inge and instead chose a new pretender (kongsemne), Sigurd Munn's son, Håkon the Broadshouldered. This development has been seen as the first sign of a new stage in the civil wars: The warring parties no longer simply sprung up around a king or pretender but stayed together after the fall of their leader and elected a new figurehead, heralding the formation of more firmly organized warring factions. A figurehead is all that Håkon could have been in 1157, as he was only ten years old. However, his followers had him named king and continued the fight against Inge. In 1161 they succeeded in killing Inge in battle in Oslo. Magnus Erlingsson and the Church In 1161 Inge's followers took the same course of action as Øystein's followers had four years earlier and elected a new figurehead rather than submit to Håkon. The choice fell upon the five-year-old Magnus Erlingsson, the son of one of their most prominent leaders, the lendmann Erling Skakke, by his wife Kristin, daughter of King Sigurd the Crusader. Erling, with the title jarl, became the real leader of the faction. The next year they succeeded in defeating and killing Håkon in battle at Sekken in the Romsdalsfjord. The year after that another son of Sigurd Munn, Sigurd Markusfostre, who had been set up as a new pretender